The Wikiness

Being a rôle model came with my first class of students, a whole new identity outside the classroom that I’d need to embody in order to keep my job in Reagan’s America. The drug tests I had to pass and the expectation of impeccable behavior and bottomless sacrifice were implicit but persistent warnings in my professional brain. I stayed aware of and had respect for my duty to care for the community’s children. 

This public self was helpful:  it kept me from accepting “just one more” on festive occasions, or from attending concerts where my students could be, or from mentioning my politics in the classroom, or from allowing even a speeding ticket to besmirch my record. I see now that role-modeling saved me from problems that my less scrupulous peers or those in less public jobs may have had to deal with.

When I agreed to work as a public servant, I accepted this social identity. It is what happens in a traditional western marriage, too, where young men agree to be husbands, to bridle their procreative urges in order to get the benefits of a wife and family. When it works, this deal meets everyone’s needs and creates the basic unit of a functioning society. I’m grateful in the same way for what parenting did for my character–it made me more conscientious. Even if I wasn’t feeling it, when my kids were around, I always attempted my best imitation of a solid rock. 

More than deterring me from “conduct unbecoming” charges outside the school, I believe being an exemplar also made me better inside the building. In another, less public job, the accountability to be highly proficient might have been moderate. But since I was charged to teach English and French, I felt the need to write and talk masterfully.  

I sought to become ever-more perfect in my French accent, vocabulary, and use of the subjunctive. In English I strove to model practices that experts agreed were best in reading, composition, and organization. If I were going to teach literacy, why, I would be a paragon of literacy myself. This extended to my speech. For a while in the 1980s, I would, when addressing my class, pepper my English diction with abstruse words (like “abstruse”) that I’m sure were ridiculously unintelligible to my charges. In this day of vocabulary analogy sections on the SATs, I reasoned it would prepare students and might further spark a desire for learning. “What did he say?” I imagined them whispering to each other, then scurrying off to a dictionary to find out. 

I also modeled for my class via examples of my own creative writing–writing always based on course materials–I wanted to let them see how it was done, this whole facility with language thing. “This language is my ancestors’/it’s in my blood,” I told them. “I must sing with it, or be dumb.” 

At first I brought in finished pieces, but wisely, got brave and humbly modeled my clumsy process and rough, rough drafts, so they could see how one “fails forward.” Deeper rôle-modeling like this I think made me a more relatable teacher.